I could be wrong, but it seems like it'd be nearly impossible to make something like that. A literal translation app is possible and might exist, but you'd be missing out on a whoooole lot of nuance and contextual cues, so what you'd be reading would have the potential to be really far off-base, and the syntax might not even be properly converted.

As Bavalt says, an automated translation app would be next to useless. However, for popular visual novels there are often fan projects to translate them into English and (if you a running the VN on a computer rather than a console or mobile device) you can download a fan-made patch to replace the in-game text.

It is probably worth doing an internet search before you buy a particular visual novel to see whether there is a fan translation project and how much progress they have made.

As Bavalt says, an automated translation app would be next to useless. However, for popular visual novels there are often fan projects to translate them into English and (if you a running the VN on a computer rather than a console or mobile device) you can download a fan-made patch to replace the in-game text.

It is probably worth doing an internet search before you buy a particular visual novel to see whether there is a fan translation project and how much progress they have made.

Tsk tsk, we do not encourage illegal downloading around these parts if that is what you meant.

There is an application that grabs the text from a VN while you're playing it and will machine translate it in real time. But those will give you a headache after a while. Japanese isn't the easiest thing to translate into English in the first place, especially with a machine.

Google Translator is pretty good at small passages that don't have much in the way of either idiom ("He was like a cat in heat" could easily come back "he was a baked feline") or nuance ("He could be dumb, sure, but he wasn't really an idiot" only works because of subtle differences in the synonyms, which not all languages have)--and that's if you don't mind sentences coming out garbled sometimes. (The words might all be translated reasonably, but getting the verbs, nouns, and adjectives all in the right place is another thing altogether.) Names can also be problematic; I want the name of the heroine of Clannad to be translated as "Nagisa" not as "Shore".

If you did an entire Light Novel with an automatic translator, it's possible that the end result would be legible--with some imagination. But it wouldn't be fun or easy to read.

As Bavalt says, an automated translation app would be next to useless. However, for popular visual novels there are often fan projects to translate them into English and (if you a running the VN on a computer rather than a console or mobile device) you can download a fan-made patch to replace the in-game text.

It is probably worth doing an internet search before you buy a particular visual novel to see whether there is a fan translation project and how much progress they have made.

Tsk tsk, we do not encourage illegal downloading around these parts if that is what you meant.

Why on earth would I be encouraging illegal downloading?
You buy a legal copy of a visual novel in the native language and you download a fan made patch which translates the text into English. The company that produces the game receives the money they are owed and the patch actually increases their total number of sales.
A fan made translation will have about the same legal status as you using some sort of automated translation but would (normally) be of a superior quality.

As Bavalt says, an automated translation app would be next to useless. However, for popular visual novels there are often fan projects to translate them into English and (if you a running the VN on a computer rather than a console or mobile device) you can download a fan-made patch to replace the in-game text.

It is probably worth doing an internet search before you buy a particular visual novel to see whether there is a fan translation project and how much progress they have made.

Tsk tsk, we do not encourage illegal downloading around these parts if that is what you meant.

Why on earth would I be encouraging illegal downloading?
You buy a legal copy of a visual novel in the native language and you download a fan made patch which translates the text into English. The company that produces the game receives the money they are owed and the patch actually increases their total number of sales.
A fan made translation will have about the same legal status as you using some sort of automated translation but would (normally) be of a superior quality.

Not sure what you meant there, but essentially you'd still be going to pirate site anyway. I can understand why one would downloaded a fanmade patch, including quality and in Grisaia's case censorship. I"m not sure about the legality of patches but sometimes they do come with the full game, which our goddess CR-Hime would frown upon. This is especially true for lesser known novels like 365 imouto and imouto paradise, istead of say Realta Nua for FSN. Why, just the other year, Fuwanovels destroyed all links to pirate websites.

Not sure what you meant there, but essentially you'd still be going to pirate site anyway.

That depends entirely on where the translators have chosen to post the patch - the translation projects I have encountered store their files on sites related solely to translations, with no pirated content.
You may be getting confused between the fan translation projects and the pirates who use the patch when they make the full product available. Sometimes the fan projects and the pirates are the same people but in the majority of cases I have seen they appear to be separate.

For understandable reasons I am not going to point to examples as that would breach the very rules I have already been accused of breaching.

For complete clarity as you misunderstood my first post and are not sure what I meant with the second - I do not condone in any way the pirating of visual novels. My understanding is that this thread is solely about translating a legitimate copy of the visual novel and the availability of translation resources. If you are still unsure about the meaning of my posts feel free to report them to a moderator and I will be happy for them to be deleted if they think it is appropriate.